Video: Creating spherical highlights

I've saved my progress as Blended smile.psd, found inside the 22_warp folder and in this exercise, we're going to set about creating the eyes. Because if the robot has a smile, he ought to have some bright eyes as well I figured, instead of these holes in his head, and we are going to be drawling these eyes using the Elliptical Marquee tool. So make sure your good smile layer is selected which is the top layer in the stack and then go down to the Shape tool flyout menu and select the Ellipse tool, and then I'm going to drag around the eye like so, and I am going to press the Shift key, so that we're getting an exact circle, and I'll use the Spacebar to align that circle exactly over that cavernous black eye, over on the left-hand side, because the left-hand eye is bigger than the right-hand eye inside of this illustration.

Photoshop CS5 One-on-One: Advanced, the second part of the popular and comprehensive series, updated for CS5, follows internationally renowned Photoshop guru Deke McClelland as he dives into the workings of Photoshop. He explores such digital-age wonders as the Levels and Curves commands, edge-detection filters, advanced compositing techniques, vector-based text, the Liquify filter, and Camera Raw. Deke also teaches tried-and-true methods for sharpening details, smoothing over wrinkles and imperfections, and enhancing colors without harming the original image. Exercise files accompany the course.

Creating spherical highlights

I've saved my progress as Blended smile.psd, found inside the 22_warp folder andin this exercise, we're going to set about creating the eyes.Because if the robot has a smile, he ought to have some bright eyes as well Ifigured, instead of these holes in his head, and we are going to be drawlingthese eyes using the Elliptical Marquee tool.So make sure your good smile layer is selected which is the top layer in thestack and then go down to the Shape tool flyout menu and select the Ellipsetool, and then I'm going to drag around the eye like so, and I am going to pressthe Shift key, so that we're getting an exact circle, and I'll use the Spacebarto align that circle exactly over that cavernous black eye, over on theleft-hand side, because the left-hand eye is bigger than the right-hand eyeinside of this illustration.

So I just want to make sure I am going to cover both of them with this one circle.So I am just going to draw one circle and then clone it in just a moment.Anyway, make sure that your circle is all the way around the eye and thenrelease and with any luck you should see this effect here.You should see a big white kind of pearl in front of the robot's face andwhat Photoshop has done is it has gone ahead and picked up the last settings we applied.These were the settings that we used to create the teeth.So in other words, White is the color and the Fill Opacity value for me is 100%.

Now if it's 5% for you, it doesn't matter.It's not going to change the effect.What's more important is that you see these effects listed;Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, Bevel and Emboss, and Color Overlay.If you don't and you have access to those styles that I provided you with in aprevious chapter, then you can go ahead and apply the water style to this newshape layer that you've created, and that should go ahead and fill things out.Then let's go ahead and rename the new layer eyes, because after all, that'swhat they're going to be.Then I want you to switch to your Black Arrow tool either by clicking on it inthe toolbox or pressing the A key, and then click on the path outline in orderto select it, that circle, that is, and then Alt+Drag it or Option+Drag it over theright eye of the robot.

And if you feel some snapping occurring as you very likely will, just try toavoid it as much as possible and put that eye in place, and I want to keep itfrom covering too much of the right-hand edge of that stripe.So right about there, looks pretty good to me, and we now have two pearlssitting in front of the robot.Well, obviously, the pearl effect has got go, but we're going to build the eyeeffect complete with pupils incidentally, using these existing layer effects.We're just going to add one, an inner glow as you'll see;otherwise we're going to modify the effects that we currently have.

All right, to get rid of the vector outlines here inside the Image window, clickon the vector mask thumbnail in the Layers panel to go ahead and turn it off,and then what I want you to do is double-click on Color Overlay because thefirst thing that we need to switch out is the color.It needs to be green after all.So double-click on Color Overlay.Now you can see here right off the bat we have some blend mode problems.We are not going to get anywhere with imparting color inside these irises at an opacity of 5%.So go ahead and crank that all the way up to 100%.It still doesn't look any different.

That's because of the Linear Light blend mode.So we are applying this light blue to the white background using Linear Light,and the white is absolutely washing out the blue.In order to see the color full on, let's switch the blend mode from Linear Light to Normal.So we are just basically replacing the color of these eyes.Now they're at least blue, so they have some color associated with them, thathappens to be the wrong color, of course.So click on the color swatch in order to bring up the color picker dialog box,then move your cursor out into the robot and click on the green just below theright-hand eye in order to lift the dark green, like that.

And here's the Hue, Saturation, and Brightness values I lifted;these are the ones I ended up coming up with.I took the Hue value to 105 degrees so very close to what I had.I took the Saturation value down to 50% and then I raised the Brightness valuequite a bit, because those eyes look way too dark, to 65% like so, and now we havethese very bright green irises.They will be irises anyway once we're done.Click OK to accept that modification.Now then I want to change the highlights.

These highlights, by the way, are being imparted by the Bevel and Emboss effect.I want to scoot the highlights down so that we lose this kind of ribbon ofhighlight along the bottom-right edge, and we keep just a big burst ofhighlight that will appear both over the iris and the pupil that we'll createin the next exercise.So, click on Bevel and Emboss in order to select it, and this is all thefunction of that Altitude value.Remember Altitude from the previous chapter;it determines the location of the sun in the sky.

So that is, is it 0 degrees and right on the horizon, or Is it 90 degrees andstraight up ahead, so high noon?Well, we want to go ahead and raise the altitude, but remember that altitudeand angle make up global light, and there is some other directional effectsgoing on inside of this composition, including some other Bevel and Embosseffects that use Altitude.So I don't want to override the global altitude while I change this one here.So I am going to turn off Use Global Light.Now that's going to mess up the Angle value.

If I turn it back on, notice the Angle value was 135 degrees.As soon as I turn off Use Global Light, it sinks down to 120 degrees.Let's go ahead and reinstate the angle of 135 because I like that, and now theAltitude is dipped down to 30 degrees that's way too low.We have a much more dramatic ribbon of color through the robot's eyes.So it seems to me we're going to be able to displace this ribbon by raising theAltitude value, and I'm saying that because lowering the Altitude value, whichhappened by default, gave us a bigger ribbon.

All right, so I am going to press Shift+ Up Arrow to take it to 40 degrees whichis where it was just a moment ago.Press Shift+Up Arrow again, notice I am moving that ribbon downward, and I'mbringing out this highlight in the upper left-hand corner. That's good.Press Shift+Up Arrow again;we're almost, there one more time, and it takes us to an Altitude of 70 degrees.So we now have this wonderful highlight inside of these robot eyes.The only thing that we're missing at this point is the pupil, and we are goingto create the pupil using an unusual application of Inner Glow, as I'll explainin the next exercise.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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